


Calamity Song

by dancinguniverse



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, True Detective
Genre: Canon Compliant, Challenge Response, End of the World, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 09:53:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2224644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cthulhu AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calamity Song

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[Translation]Calamity Song灾难之歌](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3338738) by [isaakfvkampfer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaakfvkampfer/pseuds/isaakfvkampfer)



> Thanks to the lovely scioscribe for beta work and tons of insightful comments. All remaining mistakes are mine. 
> 
> This work is part of the [True Detective Mini Bang](http://truedetectivebb.livejournal.com/) over on LJ, and has [amazing accompanying art](http://badsketches.livejournal.com/43237.html) by badsketches. Please check it out, and leave some love!

**1998**

The crime scene is worse than Dora Lange, and Marty only sees it in pictures for a consultation, is spared visiting the site himself. He still hugs his girls a little tighter than normal when he gets home. He pours himself a drink, and Maggie pauses in shaking green beans into a pan to watch the level of alcohol in his glass out of the corner of her eye. He shakes his head. “Bad case,” he mutters. “Not even mine, just—bad.”

He feels her eyes on him as she continues around the kitchen, pulling down plates and setting the oven. “You want to talk about it?” she asks, rolling up little Pillsbury crescent rolls, and he shakes his head.

He sets the table for Maggie, and during dinner he tries to keep up with Audrey’s sixth grade academic strife, Macie’s upcoming dance recital. He cuts into his meat, rare like he prefers, and it pulls apart like the muscle it is, floods his plate with red juice, and almost makes him gag. He pushes it aside, takes a second helping of green beans instead.

He stays up too late watching TV, but couldn’t tell you the name of any of the programs he had on. Sometime between _I Love Lucy_ and _Dick Van Dyke_ , he drifts into sleep. He dreams about being hunted by something massive and just out of sight, something that follows behind and flanks around him, slow but inexorable. When he wakes though, the only thing he remembers is the smell of swampwater, and even that swirls down the drain with the soapsuds in his shower.

 

Marty enters the office to see Rust hunched over in his seat, staring at something on his desk. Marty walks past him, drops his sunglasses and keys on his desk. “Morning,” he says. Rust, intent on his work, doesn’t respond, which is nothing new. Marty still lives in the hope of civilizing Rust one of these days though, so when he pours himself a coffee in the break room, he pours another for Rust and walks it over to him. Leading by example and all. He holds it over Rust’s shoulder and now that he’s standing close, he sees what it is Rust is so intent on: there’s a small figurine centered on the otherwise empty expanse of his desk.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Marty asks, bending down to squint at it. It’s made of dark stone with a hint of green and looks like some kind of messed up dragon. “Ugly as all get out.”

“Belonged to Kelly Doyle.” Marty makes a face and straightens automatically. Like he hadn’t seen enough of that case yesterday. There hadn’t been any antlers in sight, but the brutality and primitivism had drawn a lot of comparisons to their case from the other year. Of course, with Ledoux dead and Doyle’s murderers caught in the act, Marty was fine with leaving the whole mess alone, op-eds on the rising tide of satanic violence be damned. But they’d been asked to consult, and of course it figures Rust would take an interest. He has his elbows braced on his desk, still hasn’t taken his eyes off the tiny winged statue. Hasn’t even taken the coffee from Marty’s hand, so Marty waves it in his face, breaking Rust’s line of sight.

“But what is it?” he repeats, ignoring Rust’s irritated sideway glance and leaning one hip on the side of Rust’s desk.

Rust finally takes the mug from his hands, shifting his weight in the chair to face Marty. The lines on his face look deeper than normal, troubled. “I don’t know.”

Marty thinks about mocking him, but he glances at the statue again and can’t bring himself to say anything. He doesn’t like looking at it much. It’s creepy for such a little thing, fat and bloated, with oddly tiny wings and what look to be tentacles hanging from its face. Half the suspects they have locked up will be heading to psych wards instead of prison, and the warrants to search their properties are still being served, but turning up little so far. Marty can’t say he’s satisfied with how this is shaking out either.

“What are you thinking?” he finally asks.

Rust turns his mug in his hands, eyes straying back to the statue. “I’d like to know if those markings mean anything.” He gestures, and for the first time Marty notices the engravings on the base of the statue. It looks like writing of some kind but it’s not using any alphabet Marty’s ever seen.

“You wanna look up some archaeologists or something?”

“Or something,” Rust agrees.

“It’s not our case.” Marty’s not sure if he’s reminding Rust or himself.

Rust takes a long sip of his coffee before replying. “Don’t remember asking you to tag along.”

Marty rolls his eyes and leaves. A few phone calls and an hour later and he’s got a list research focuses from the state’s colleges and universities, those that have archaeology departments.

Rust looks up from pictures of the Doyle murder, naked bodies and bloody drum circles. “Good work,” he says. Marty tries not to take the tone of faint surprise personally. It’s not him, after all; Rust doesn’t think anyone outside his own head is paying attention.

 

It’s a week before they have time for the drive over to New Orleans. They try three different schools and get passed around departments as one after another professor apologizes that they don’t know what the statue and writing are, but it’s definitely not their area. “Looks legit though,” most offer. One professor taps on the statue’s base with a gentle fingernail.

“You even know what this is made of?” she asks. “I can walk you down to the lab, we share equipment with geology.”

“Have you talked to the Classics department?” another suggests. “Translation’s more their wheelhouse than ours.”

They’re being offered coffee in one of the department lounges—Marty loses track after a while—when a professor of European history overhears their story and asks to see the statue.

Rust recounts once again the murder of Kelly Doyle, the parts they’re allowed to tell people anyway. The professor, Andrews, looks troubled. He tells them about a group in Sweden in the late nineteenth century who had been executed for similar crimes and whose iconography, he tells them, was startlingly similar.

“Of course, it was worse than that,” he adds. “Cult worship, orgies, even human sacrifice.” Marty elbows Rust, eyeing him meaningfully. That stuff hadn’t been in the papers but it had been there at the crime scene. Rust ignores Marty, listens politely to the professor, and takes a page of tidy notes. “And yes, I would say the writing was very like to what you have there, though we never got enough to understand the full language. Only one of their prayers was ever translated, their central chant: _Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn_ : _In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._ ” Andrews waggles his eyebrows, then seems struck by an idea. “Had the victim traveled to Sweden recently?”

He gives them a stack of photocopied journal articles and Rust thanks him for his time.

Walking across the parking lot, Marty tries to claim a victory, but Rust shakes his head. “What’s some group from Sweden a hundred years ago got to do with this case? Just because they sound like they were chanting the same name? Human memory is laughably fallible. Hell, the game of telephone we’re playing means I’m probably not even saying the name right, and who knows where Andrews got his story. ”

“I don’t know,” Marty replies, unlocking the car. “I mean, what kind of name is Cthulhu? Kind of sticks with you, you know?”

 

Marty doesn’t sneak out since Lisa. And he does his part around the house. He picks Macie up from ballet Wednesday evenings and he and Maggie set up date nights once a month. But some nights Marty gets home and Maggie’s cooking dinner and the girls are doing homework and later there will be TV and Maggie will read for a while before rolling over and turning off the light and Marty is just… there. He feels like an observer in his own life, like if he wasn’t there, it would continue on just the same without him.

But he can’t fuck it up again with some girl, so when he starts feeling that way he makes Rust his focus instead. If he’s superfluous in his own home, at least he can make Rust eat a hot meal and feel like he’s done something with his evening. Besides which, if (when) Rust chooses to ignore him, Marty knows it’s an indication of the value Rust puts on humanity in general, and not a personal indictment of his failings as a husband and father.

Tonight they grab dinner at the barbeque place around the corner from CID, and though they eat it sitting at the bar, Marty has a glass of sweet tea in his hand, and Rust a glass of water. Rust tells him about the interrogation he took at another precinct the previous day, a drug dealer and now confessed murderer, and Marty steals his coleslaw. Rust doesn’t let anything go to waste, but Marty can tell by what he eats last and slowest what he doesn’t care for. Besides, it’s good slaw here.

Afterwards Marty trails Rust home. Rust doesn’t invite him in, but he leaves the door ajar when he sees Marty pull up behind him. By the time Marty steps inside, Rust is settled into his chair, tie gone and shirt unbuttoned, scanning through the printouts from Professor Andrews. The figurine is perched on the table in front of him.

If it weren’t for the fact that Rust had pulled the second chair open, there’d be no sign he was even aware of Marty’s presence. Marty settles into the chair, watching Rust’s shoulders move as he flips the pages, jots down notes in the margins. Marty clears his throat and looks at the table, but that’s not any less unnerving.

“That statue,” Marty starts, and then can’t finish. It sounds stupid. “It’s fucking eerie,” he says aloud. What he means is, it’s started giving him nightmares, and it’s just a piece of stone smaller than his hand. “Why do you keep it around?”

“Keeps me focused,” Rust replies. Then he glances up. “Eerie how?”

Marty fumbles. “Just—“ It’s stone, but the green highlights make it look like it’s moving sometimes, oozing off its pedestal and out into the world. The tentacles, the wings, it doesn’t quite hang together. It feels wrong, grates on Marty’s mind when it catches his eye, and it always catches his eye. But it’s probably most eerie in the way it’s invaded his mind even when he’s not looking at it. When he’s drifting off to sleep, when he’s trying to kiss his girls good night, he sees the creature full-sized in his mind’s eye, rising up out of the bayou, slobbering to shore. He can’t say how he knows it would be a leviathan when there’s no scale given for the statue, but he’s sure: it’s a monster. “It’s wrong,” is all he can say.

Now he has Rust’s undivided attention. “How you know that?”

Marty gestures impatiently. “How do you not? You’re telling me you don’t feel that?”

Rust’s eyes bore into his for another minute. “I smell it,” he says finally. “Like blood and swamp water.”

Marty suppresses a shudder, because that’s the scent of his dreams these days.

In the end it doesn’t matter. The Doyle case proceeds along to trial, and nothing they dig up on the figurine answers any more questions pertaining to the murder. The figurine isn’t introduced as evidence in the trial and Kelly’s parents never retrieve her effects. The statue comes to live on Rust’s desk. Marty arranges his pencil and file holders so he doesn’t have to look at it.

 

**2002**

They get a lot of prints off the payphone that was the last to talk to Guy Francis, but nothing that leads anywhere, to Marty’s utter lack of surprise. Instead, Rust slides in front of Marty’s face before he’s had his morning coffee with a photo of the back of the payphone. Marty yawns and squints at the picture. Someone has scrawled a sentence into the metal surface. “ _In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming_ ,” he reads aloud. He looks at Rust expectantly. “The fuck is that supposed to be?”

Rust step back and digs under the paperwork and debris that even his relatively neat desk eventually accumulates, and produces the figurine. Marty’s jaw tightens. He’d forgotten about it entirely.

(Except when he hasn’t, except when he can’t, except when his dreams turn fitful and something bigger than the world hangs over his head, waiting to descend and crush him, and he wakes with the smell of decay in his nostrils.)

Marty busies himself shuffling paperwork on his own desk, ducking his head to avoid looking at the small weight in Rust’s hand. “So what?” he grunts. “Coulda been scribbled there years ago. Who says that’s got anything to do with anything?”

Rust jerks his head in disbelief. “You saying this is just a big coincidence? Wake up, Marty. There’s something going on here, something bigger than Guy Francis and Reggie Ledoux. You know it, you just won’t say.”

“I don’t know nothing,” Marty insists. “And you’d do well to keep your head down. Salter’s not happy about your shenanigans with Francis. You’re lucky he offed himself, or there’d be an even bigger stink getting raised about the way you handled that interrogation. Chill the fuck out, yeah?”

Rust’s face is drawn tight, his hand clenched around the statue. “You know there’s more to this,” he repeats, and stalks off.

Marty rubs a hand over his eyes. He doesn’t _know_ anything. It’s just a feeling, like in the dreams, that behind him, around him, something big is waiting. Something with teeth.

 

Three months after the fight, after Rust leaves and Marty’s life falls apart, Maggie drops off a box of his things at Marty’s new apartment. Marty takes it with surprise. “Thought you’d have trashed it just for spite.”

Maggie’s mouth curls. It looks like a smile, but it’s not. “That would imply I gave a damn anymore.” She returns to her car.

Marty takes it inside, flips the lid off. It’s mostly tax records and old medical bills, paperwork from old cases, and Marty realizes she must have been clearing out the enormous filing cabinet in the study. He lifts another page and finds the newspaper clipping from the end of the Lange case, the notes that he and Rust followed afterward but never put into the case file, yellow kings and black stars. There’s a page with Rust’s jagged handwriting, an address for some forgotten witness or KA, and next to it an inked drawing, only half complete, of something with wings and tentacles. _Unmask_ , is calligraphed along its spine.

Marty’s not like Maggie. He pulls a matchbook out of the kitchen drawer, holds the paper over the sink, and watches it burn to ash.

**2012**

Rust looks bad and smells worse, but much as Marty wants to dismiss him on principle, he’s done his homework: “Now I’ve covered a surface area, alright? Pulled runaways instate and missing persons. There’s twice as many along the bayou, I don’t know why. Hell, someone should do a study, as to why.”

No one ever does get around to that study. But then, Marty and Rust were pretty busy not dying that year.

**2014**

Marty convinces himself that it’s over. What they left undone with Ledoux they closed with Childress. And if it doesn’t wrap up every single detail, then it’s still good enough. Good enough for Rust to finally move on, good enough for the two of them to make something good out of the jagged tumble of seven or seventeen years of rough-edged friendship and intimate hostility. Rust never does get around to leaving after Marty takes him in from the hospital. And if Marty still has dreams of a massive, seeping evil looming over him, well. He and Rust have a lot of nightmares between them. It’s still better with company.

At least that’s what he tells himself until the phone rings one Thursday evening while he sits in front of the TV, fighting with the invoice software on his laptop. Rust reaches backwards over his head to grab the phone off the counter, glances at the name on the screen, and hands it over without a word. “Hey,” Marty answers, still biting off the “hon,” after all these years.

“Marty,” Maggie replies. “I don’t want to scare you, but Audrey’s having problems again. It’s pretty bad.”

Marty straightens in his seat. “Bad how? Is she okay? I mean—“ he bites his tongue. Of course she’s not. “Bad how?” he repeats. Rust watches him and sets his hand on Marty’s knee, waiting.

“I don’t know yet. Chris called,” and Marty has to rack his brain before he remembers Audrey’s boyfriend, who he still hasn’t met. “Said she woke up this morning hallucinating, talking nonsense, terrified out of her mind. The doctors think she must have taken something that interfered with her prescription, but Chris swears they stayed in last night, that she’s good about her meds these days. Anyway, the instant tests were all negative, but they’re running full screens on her now.”

“So, it’s not drugs?” Marty asks, confused. Audrey’s had problems with her moods and emotions that Marty hasn’t ever pretended to understand, but hallucinations are a whole new ballgame.

“We don’t know.” Maggie’s voice is strained. “We’re hoping it is, because otherwise Audrey’s going to need a lot more help. This could be bad, Marty. That’s why I’m calling. I thought you should know.”

Marty rubs at his forehead. “Yeah, alright. Thanks for letting me know. Should I—I don’t know—come see her? Where is she?”

“Baton Rouge General. Macie and I are here. She’s not lucid,” Maggie adds bluntly. “I’ll keep you up to date, let you know when we hear something.”

“Sure,” Marty says slowly, hears the message loud and clear: he’s not needed. Family only, and he doesn’t make the cut these days. It’s not news to him, but it stings nonetheless.

There’s a pause, and Maggie relents. “Look, I’m not warning you away, Marty. Really, there’s nothing you can do. They’ve got her sedated right now, Macie’s getting some food, then I’m going to head to a hotel for a while. When she is awake, she just goes on about sunken cities and stars and dead things beneath the waves. Honestly?” her voice is thinner now, tired and a bit unsteady. “It’s scaring me.”

Something bores up through Marty’s memories like a line from a forgotten poem. “Dead things?” he repeats.

“Something that’s dead and dreaming,” she says impatiently. “I told you, it’s nonsense.” There are muffled voices over the line before Maggie says, “The doctor’s here. I’ll call you when we know something.” The line goes quiet.

Marty stares at the coffee table for a long moment, his hand falling to the couch seat. Rust takes the computer from his lap and waits, hands folded and kept to himself. “I heard Audrey,” he says. “But not all the details.”

Marty pulls one knee up on the couch to face Rust. “She’s in the hospital,” he says, and repeats the basics. “But what Maggie said she’s saying…” he trails off, reluctant to put it into words, dredge it fully up from the past.

Rust puts a hand on the back of his neck, squeezing lightly. “She ain’t herself right now,” he tells Marty. “Don’t bother yourself on the details.”

Marty shakes his head. “No, not like that. Maggie said it’s all about dead things in the water, dreaming. And stars. And it sounds like—“

Rust lurches to his feet, strides away to pull a box of old notebooks from the hall closet, and pages through for a minute. Marty waits, hoping he can’t find it, that it’s just unrelated crazy talk, that—“ _They lay in stone houses under the waves preserved by great Cthulu until the stars and the earth are ready for them again,_ ” Rust reads out from an interview conducted almost two decades ago. “And dead Cthulhu lays dreaming.” He walks back over to the couch, bringing the notebook with him, and sinks down next to Marty.

Marty nods to himself, gathering his courage. “In your dreams,” he starts. “You ever…”

“It comes out of the water,” Rust says tightly. “And then the world disappears. But that’s a dream. After the shit we’ve seen? Course I have fucking nightmares.”

“But why Audrey?” Marty asks. “What’s she got to do with any of this?”

Rust shakes his head. “I don’t know. But we’re gonna find out.”

 

They unpack boxes from storage, the things Rust was keeping in his storage shed, the things he wouldn’t throw away. “Never could convince myself it was over,” he admits quietly to Marty as they’re hanging maps again in the back room of the office, pinning up photos and newspaper clippings. Marty rubs an apologetic hand down his back.

“Who else?” Rust demands once they’re set up, a grisly array of evidence and history spread along the walls: Lange and Olivier and Doyle and Childress and Tuttle. “Who else knew something?”

Marty ticks them off on his fingers. “Dewall: dead, Ledoux: dead, Charlie Lange: dead. What about Theriot? Think he could offer up anything else?”

Rust nods thoughtfully. “Might do. If he hasn’t drank himself to death too.”

 

Rust goes off to find Theriot, and Marty stops by CID. He considers going to the major, but in the end he surprises himself by asking for Gilbough, whose warm greeting almost seems genuine. “How you doing?” he asks, and Marty thinks he’s probably one of the rare people who wants an honest answer. He and Papania didn’t chase the case as long as he and Rust did, but by God they tried.

In the end he doesn’t tell Gilbough anything about Audrey or their theories, but he doesn’t bother bullshitting him either, just looks him right in the eye and makes his voice soft enough that it’s obvious it’s a favor he’s asking for. “I need to see the evidence list and photos from last year.”

Gilbough’s smile fades, but he doesn’t pull away. He studies Marty thoughtfully for a moment. “Come here,” he offers, and leads Marty out of the watchful eyes of the bullpen. “Let’s see what we can do.”

 

Over takeout fried rice and sesame chicken that night, Rust and Marty compare notes. Theriot is in the wind, and while Rust has a few leads, he says it’ll take a while to track him down. Marty stacks the evidence boxes proudly on the table. “Not everything, but the full list and photos are in here, so we can figure out if there’s anything more we need.”

Rust blinks at him. “How’d you get that?”

Marty enjoys the rare times he manages to stump Rust. “I asked for it, asshole. It’s called people skills.”

Rust rolls his eyes and starts digging through the box. There are a few old books he flips through and sets aside, and a notebook that catches his eye of course, all penciled drawings of spirals and flowers and genitalia. Marty peers at it over Rust’s shoulder. “Charming,” he observes, because to actually think about Childress sketching these out would send every bit of dinner back up his throat. “Don’t think he had your knack for it though.”

Rust grunts and Marty sits back down, shoves his plate away from him, and starts going through the photos from the house. He plans on it being a long night. Partly because he wants to move forward, but also because he knows he and Rust won’t sleep tonight anyway. May as well work through it.

 

At six Rust says he’s going to get coffee, and Marty rubs his eyes. “I need some shut-eye,” he admits. With the morning light rolling in through the windows, he thinks he might achieve it, even after the nightmarish memories they’ve waded through for the last twelve hours. He has Rust drop him off at home, and Marty falls asleep on the couch with his shoes still on.

He wakes up around noon to a call from Maggie. Audrey is no better. They’ve found a balance in the sedatives between hysteria and unconsciousness, but she makes as little sense as before. All her drug screenings from when she was admitted are negative, but Chris reports that three more of their friends are in similar conditions at hospitals across the city.

“So maybe it’s something that isn’t showing up in their tox screenings,” Maggie tells him. He can picture her hand on her face, her worried posture, as if he were in the room. “But she’s not coming out of it, Marty. I’m scared. Chris says their other friends are just as bad.”

“Can I talk to him?” Marty asks.

“I guess so,” Maggie replies, distracted. “Why?”

Marty shrugs, even though she can’t see it. “Just want to ask some questions. I’m not gonna get on his case, you already said he’s been nothing but helpful.”

“Hang on.”

There’s a short pause, and then an unfamiliar voice. “Mr. Hart?”

“Hi, Chris,” Marty says. “Sorry we haven’t had the chance to meet in person yet.”

Marty doesn’t mean to grill the kid, but he realizes only a minute into the conversation that he’s treating Chris as a witness, their sick friends as victims. They’re from different parts of the city, two more painters and a poet, and none of them share Audrey’s history.

“I mean, I don’t know Holly that well, so maybe,” Chris admits. “No one’s even seen Joe in six weeks, I didn’t know he was back until his roommate called me.”

Marty sighs. “Anything else you can tell me? Even small details can be helpful.”

“The night before,” he says after a thoughtful pause. “Before she started… she was crazy into her latest piece. It didn’t look like her usual work. Just lots of black and green water. And wings.”

Marty thanks him and hangs up, pressing his phone to his forehead. Rust is still out, Marty’s car is at the office, and Rust doesn’t answer his cell phone when Marty tries. Marty makes himself a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and then pulls open his laptop again, returning to a question that had bothered him last night. There had been hundreds of books in the house. The police hadn’t cataloged everything there. But there had been only one book found in the tunnels in Carcosa, and Marty remembers flipping it open last night and being puzzled by the simplicity of the printing—it looked almost hand-designed, and there was no publisher or copyright, just a title: _The Yellow King_.

Marty starts with Amazon and, when that turns up nothing, Google. He reads for a long time.

 

It’s getting dark out again before he shakes himself out of his reverie and realizes he hasn’t heard from Rust all day, and that worries him. He calls his cell again, and then the office, and finally Rust picks up. “I’ve got something,” he answers.

“Me too,” Marty replies. “But you’ve got both cars.”

“I’m coming.”

“Rust,” Marty says before the line can go dead. “You got that book there? _The Yellow King_?”

There’s a short pause, and Marty can hear Rust’s breathing over the line. “Yeah. What about it?”

“Don’t read it, yeah? I’ll explain when you get here. Just—don’t read it.”

“I’ll be right there,” Rust answers, and hangs up. Marty practices steady breathing, glad Rust isn’t there to check his pulse, because he’s got no reason for it to be racing. No reason at all.

 

When he pulls up outside, Rust looks wired like he gets on cases that are picking up speed, but Marty has to wonder if he’s on something to be this wound up after two full days without sleep. It doesn’t help that his first words are, “You got your gun?”

“Yeah,” Marty answers automatically, before he realizes what a fucked up question that is. “What the hell’d you turn up?”

“I talked to one of the guys from the Doyle case,” Rust answers hurriedly, turning not back towards the office, but south out of town. “He’s still locked up in a psych ward, lucky for us, just over the city line. I got some new details from him, think I can take us to their spot in the woods. He said the stars are right,” and now Rust’s voice is thick with disdain, “but maybe that means we could catch some of these motherfuckers in the act.”

Marty frowns at him. “You sure that’s safe?”

Rust just levels him a look. “What’s your thing?” he asks instead of answering.

Marty sighs and rubs away the crawling feeling on the back of his neck. “That book? It ain’t supposed to be real. It’s like, the Atlantis of literature or something. It’s a play. Apparently a bunch of references to it in some really old historical accounts, like Greek and Roman, but China too, and no one’s ever found a real copy. And the accounts all say that you go crazy if you read it. Like actually certifiable.” He chews on his lip worriedly.

Rust snorts. “So you think we shouldn’t? That ain’t the way the world works, Marty.”

Marty narrows his eyes, annoyed by Rust’s dismissal. “Yeah, but religion’s a virus of the mind?”

Rust swings his head around, eyebrows briefly raised in surprise. “Yeah,” he agrees slowly, and Marty wonders if Rust even knew he was talking to other people sometimes back in the day, or if he was just keeping running dialogues with himself. “But that’s something that settles in over time. The ancient con of religion is that you convince yourself you want to change. Hell, that you need to, that God desires it, so it must be good for you. Not every fool who picks up a Bible starts speaking in tongues and preaching to the masses.”

“I’m just saying, here’s this book supposed to induce madness, here’s all these crazy people running around: Doyle’s gang, Ledoux and Childress sure , now Audrey and her artist friends are cracking up… you just gonna ignore that coincidence?”

“Ain’t a coincidence, Marty. I ain’t saying they’re not connected. I’m asking you what makes more sense: that a book drives a man crazy, or that a crazy man hears about said book and makes his own version up?”

Marty scowls. “What about those anthropology journals?” he presses.

“What about ‘em?” Rust asks warily.

Marty waves his hands. “We got stacks of reports about Cthulhu and dreaming gods and the same orgies and human sacrifices from all over the world, for centuries. And now it turns up here? I’m just wondering, man.” He stops himself and leans his chin on his fist, until he realizes he probably looks like Rust did for all those endless car rides, trying to crawl out the damn window. He turns to face Rust. “I’m wondering if there isn’t something more to all this.”

Rust looks over at him, eyes a little wide. “What, like an actual sea monster? Don’t fucking flake out on me, Marty.”

“Well you explain how groups so remote they ain’t never seen a Christian missionary end up with the same symbols and legends as another group halfway around the world and just as isolated.” Marty shivers. He can feel it again, like in in his dreams, pressing in all around them. He doesn’t like where this case is heading at all, and he’s ashamed to say Audrey’s only part of that. There’s an animalistic fear that’s been growing in him all day that makes him want to back into the corner of their bedroom and never come out in case the sky falls down on him.  
  
“Fuck, Marty, I can’t explain the Big Bang to you either, but it don’t mean I’m gonna start packing it in for Jesus.” Rust side eyes him. “Don’t take one unified religion to make people throw orgies and kill people, either. Just the ordinary horror and tragedy of human nature.”

Marty doesn’t know what to say. It’s not like he ever really expects the hand of God to come down and smite the wicked (and thank fuck for that, some of the shit Marty’s pulled) or aid the righteous, but that doesn’t mean that he wants to deny the possibility of something outside his understanding.

Except now, when he desperately wants to reject the slightest possibility of the existence of the thing that lumbers at the edges of his dreams.

He just can’t.

 

They drive south, crisscrossing spillways and drainage ditches until Marty feels surrounded by water already, and finally find the bridge and dirt road turnoff that Rust has been looking for. It’s a few miles down the torn up dirt road, and the swamp creeps closer the farther along it they travel. Finally, when the road in front of them dead ends into a foot trail into the trees, Rust swings the truck in a circle and noses it off the side of the road facing out. He checks his gun before swinging himself out of the cab, and Marty does the same. They head off towards the woods.

It smells dank and heavy under the trees, and on either side the swamp creeps in, boggy ground and ponds so covered in algae they look solid. There’s chanting from up ahead, and the sound of drums.

“I don’t like this,” Marty mutters. “Sounds like a lot of people.”

Rust doesn’t answer, just paces along silently next to Marty. A minute later, Marty sees movement and swings his gun up. There are people streaming through the woods on either side, moving forward parallel to Rust and Marty’s path. Marty has a moment of panic and spins, but the trail behind them is clear. The people are whispering, and Marty sees from their jerky, uneven path that they are dancing. He breathes a little harder, but keeps walking.

Rust stops, transfixed, staring wide eyed at the figures moving through the trees. Marty gets thirty feet ahead before he realizes Rust isn’t with him. He gestures impatiently, but Rust’s eyes are locked on the dancers. “What are you doing?” he whispers loudly.

Rust doesn’t move a hair. “I read the play, Marty.”

Marty stares. “Are you—“ he yelps and swallows his voice, “ _fucking_ kidding me?” he finishes in a harsh whisper. He stomps back through the tall grass. “Why—why would you do that?”

“It’s just a book,” Rust says blankly, continuing in a normal tone. “Life, however tragic and mistaken, is still a series of rational events. A memetic virus can’t actually affect you against your will.” He licks his lips. “I mean, I didn’t think so.”

“It can’t,” Marty agrees, even though he’s still not totally clear on what that means, and was just arguing the opposite. Rust sways to the beat of the drums. “It can’t,” he repeats louder, and tugs at Rust’s arm. “Look at me,” Marty demands, but Rust takes a step towards the woods.

“Can’t affect you,” he repeats absently and then, in the same tone, “ _Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”_

Marty jerks Rust around and slaps him across the face, fear stabbing at his belly. He feels, suddenly, very alone. “Look at me!” Rust reels back from the slap, but he’s still pulling away from Marty like there’s some magnetic tug from the other cultists—or whatever it is they’re dancing for.

“Rust,” he says, a plead or a warning, and then thinks, _well, fuck it_. It’s clearly not a fairy tale they’ve stumbled into. Horror seems more likely. But either way, Marty figures there’s some kind of narrative arc to this thing and he’s always been the believer out of the two of them, so he wrangles Rust in front of him, grabs him by the back of the neck, and kisses him, good and long.

He cups his other hand over Rust’s ear, partly to hold him in place, partly to block out the chanting, and partly so he can rub his thumb over Rust’s cheekbone, backing up the insistent press of his mouth. The kiss is hard at first, all desperation and pressure, but Marty tries to soften it, opens his mouth on Rust’s lower lip, scratches his fingertips through the short hair at the base of Rust’s neck. Rust’s hand comes up to grope blindly at Marty’s shoulder.

Rust pushes him away, throwing a wild punch when Marty doesn’t let go. It catches Marty across the chin and he curses and loses his grip on Rust, who turns immediately towards the woods again, eyes feverish and unseeing. “Goddamn it,” Marty mutters and kicks Rust’s knees out, tackles him down to the ground.

He’s bitterly aware that in a fair fight between them, the smart money would not be on Marty, but Rust isn’t in his right mind at the moment. He struggles blindly to get away, driven by a bone-deep urge like a zombie or some kind of migrating fish. Marty sits on Rust’s back and puts him in chokehold. “I’m real fucking sorry,” he gasps as Rust thrashes against him and then goes limp.

Marty staggers back with Rust to the truck in a fireman’s carry—motherfucker isn’t nearly as light as his bony ass would imply—and tips him into the passenger seat. He handcuffs him to the seat and takes his gun.

He heads back towards the dancing.

Their movements have intensified, and what was circling and chanting has morphed into shrieking and leaping. Marty keeps a line of trees and brush between himself and the mob, but their attention is clearly focused inwards.

He draws closer, and then the scene resolves in front of him. There are maybe fifty of the dancers he’s been closing in on, stomping and screaming and whipping their heads in a frenzy. But there are hundreds on the ground, writhing and chanting. Most are naked, but covered in dark soil and the bright red of blood. Some aren’t moving at all, possibly crushed to death by their upright fellows. Others… Marty stares. Some of them are rutting against each other, but the wide-eyed, vacant look in their eyes makes them look more animal than human. He sees a man take a bite of flesh out of a woman’s shoulder, and she only pulls him tighter against her. There are bodies hanging from the trees in various states of decay and a stone pillar erected near the center. At the top sits a replica of Rust’s statue, tentacles hanging down. Something white moves through the trees opposite Marty, bulbous and shambling, and the screaming from the crowd intensifies until suddenly with one unified shriek, the dancers fall to the ground. Everything goes still except for the lumbering being moving through the forest, coming closer, and Marty breaks and runs.

Marty stumbles back across the field, nearly tripping a few times in the tall grass, and keeping himself upright each time by pure momentum. He finally reaches the truck, falls to his knees in the relative safety of its shadow, and is promptly sick to his stomach.

He dry heaves a few times past the point that his stomach is empty. He understands how every dumb creature on a highway has ever felt in his headlights, too stupid to do the obvious thing and run away in the face of such an incomprehensible, impersonal enemy. He moans, “Jesus Christ,” and for the first time in a long time, makes it a conscious prayer. _I need some fucking help_. His hands dig into the rough grass.

“Marty?” Rust’s voice is slurred and dull. “What’s going on?”

 _I’ll take it_ , he thanks Whoever silently, and pushes himself unsteadily to his feet. “Are you you?” he asks, wiping his mouth and holding on to the truck for support.

“Yeah,” Rust says slowly, his gaze focused inward. “I’m here.” He looks up, eyes wide. “I owe you, man.”

“No shit,” Marty says weakly, and digs in his pocket for the handcuff key. “Imagine I’ll be collecting real soon, the way this day is going. They’re dead, Rust. All of ‘em, just…” he falters, fingers tightening on Rust’s wrist.

“Marty,” Rust whispers. Marty glances up from fitting the tiny key in the hole, but Rust is looking past him, eyes white-edged and scared.

“What?” he asks, just as the lock _snicks_ open.

“Get in the truck!” Rust yells, and throws himself across the seat, swiveling his wrist to grab Marty tightly and pull him in as well.

Marty gets half a glimpse over his shoulder and doesn’t hesitate. He throws himself into the cab, yanking the door shut as Rust turns the key and stomps on the gas. They kick up a thick cloud of dust as the truck races back towards the road. Rust fishtails upon hitting asphalt and nearly slides off the road before he rights the truck and speeds away north.

In the sideview mirror, Marty sees a greenish bulk rising up from the bayou. It’s taller than the trees, taller than any building, and the shambling, quivering motion of it makes the bile rise in Marty’s throat again. Rust has the pedal to the floor but it takes a long while before the gross mountain of flesh seems to recede at all. It doesn’t follow them, but Marty’s numbly aware that it doesn’t have to.

It’s awake.

 

The miles pile up behind them and Rust never lets his leaden foot off the gas, fingers clenched hard on the steering wheel. Marty calls Maggie. She doesn’t pick up. He waits through the rings, wants to tell her to run, but run where? What the fuck advice can he offer? He almost loses it when he hears her voice, cool and curt: “I can’t answer the phone right now, please leave a message.” He takes one broken breath and in the end just says, “I love you, honey. Please tell the girls I love them too. Call me.” He calls the station, because some part of him feels like he should report this shit? But there’s no response there either. Suspicious now, Marty dials 911. No one answers.

They’re an hour north when the radio stations die, falling to empty static one by one.

They make it over the border to Arkansas just before the sky goes black. Rust slams on the brakes in response, skidding to a stop at an angle and staring out wide-eyed from under the windshield.

“Is the sun gone? Did the _fucking_ _sun_ just disappear?” Marty’s voice cracks, and he’s not the slightest bit ashamed, because the motherfucking sun just went out. He’d thought the fear was bad before, but now it’s like a vise closing on his chest, and he has to lean his head on the dashboard and close his eyes for a minute. “Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ.”

When he picks his head up, Rust is breathing hard himself, fingers still tight on the steering wheel, eyes white-rimmed. “Rust,” Marty says shakily and reaches out, gripping Rust’s shoulder. Rust drags in a deep, shuddering breath and grabs Marty’s arm in return, painfully tight.

When both their breathing has evened out, Rust lets go of Marty’s arm and turns the headlights on. He puts the truck in drive, and they continue north up the highway.

 

They drive through eerie darkness unbroken by stars or the moon, the truck seemingly the only source of light left in the world. Their headlights cast oddly sharp shadows on the ground. Marty doesn’t know if it’s the Rapture and he and Rust are the only two souls too battered to make the cut or if they’ve slipped into hell already between one mile marker and the next, but they don’t see even the trace of another human being. Road signs, asphalt, and empty buildings all flicker by outside their windows, but the highways are clear and the few cars they do see parked along its sides are empty. The power must be out, because everywhere they pass is dark. Marty stops being entirely sure the world exists at all outside of him and Rust, the truck cab, and the column of road in their headlights.

They make a necessary gas stop an hour later, at a pump that looks like it was old the first time Rust and Marty paired up. The pumps work, but there’s no one around to take their money of course. They load up on water jugs, beef jerky, and trail mix.

“The looting starts with us?” Marty asks, mostly to hear the sound of his own voice—fuck, any sound.

Rust looks like he’s thinking about it before he shrugs and breaks into the cigarette case, adding a few cartons to their pile. Marty grabs a handful of Twinkies and lifts the keys from Rust’s fingers, climbing into the driver’s seat. They keep going.

They drive through the night, the darkness becoming more oppressive with every passing hour. It feels to Marty less like an absence of light, and more like a physical presence hovering over them, smothering them slowly. It takes an effort to breathe normally. Finally he can’t take the silence any more.

“You know where we’re heading?”

Rust turns to look at him, shifting his whole body. “Away,” he says, as if it should be obvious, and Marty can agree with that alright. “If that concept is even relevant under the circumstances,” he adds, and Marty wishes he hadn’t, ignores the second part.

“Got that,” he answers. “Any idea why we seem to be the only people left?”

Rust shakes his head slowly. “Nope.”

“Well, you think we really are? The only two? How does that even figure?” He glances over and does a double take when Rust laughs, a sharp bark of a sound.

“Motherfucker,” he says. “This has been a thing with you for a while, thinking for some reason I got a high speed line on the world you ain’t tapped into.” Marty scowls. “But especially in this case, one of us has been preparing his whole life for the return of god to this earth and the end of the world, and the other one dismissed the whole notion as make believe. So I figure, out of the two of us, I’m the less equipped to deal with this particular turn of events, and maybe you want to stop looking to me for guidance, you hear?”

Marty glares at him. “I don’t think anyone praying to the resurrection and the life would be prepared for a sea monster the size of a mountain.”

Rust shrugs. “Prepared for something.”

 

They stop again for gas, but the darkness is heavy and foreboding, silent and endless, and they don’t quite dare leave the patch of light cast by the truck’s lights. Marty operates the fuel pump and Rust gets out, stands next to Marty facing the opposite way like they’re on guard duty. Maybe they should be. They swap drivers again and Marty can feel exhaustion tugging at his limbs, but he can’t sleep, can’t even think about it. Instead he fills the silence by telling Rust about spring break one year, how he road tripped to Florida with some friends because their parents had a house there. He stops suddenly, halfway through. “I told you this before,” he says, the memory hazy but there.

“Yeah,” Rust agrees. Then he surprises Marty. “Go on though. I’d like to hear it again.”

Marty clears his throat. It’s not like the story is particularly up Rust’s alley, but then, these are strange times. “Okay then,” he says. He studies Rust’s profile for a minute until Rust looks over at him, eyebrows raised, and Marty picks up the thread of the story again, weaves it into something a little more bearable than the endless miles of silent darkness.

 

It’s late summer, but the clock on the dash reads six, then seven, then eight, and still the night is unbroken. “Rust,” Marty says unhappily, tapping at his watch.

“I know,” Rust says tightly.

Around noon the sky lightens again, with no sun visible to cast the rays. It’s as if the bowl of sky above them now glows with its own sweat stained light. After hours of uninterrupted dark, Marty thought he’d be grateful, but with the rising light come black marks like puncture wounds on the sky, pinpricks of darkness, with the biggest ones bleeding out into the nauseatingly yellow sky. It makes Marty’s stomach roll to see it, and he finds himself wishing for the dark again.

They make it to South Dakota before the engine dies, quietly and without warning. Marty can’t really think to question it after the way the rest of the world has stopped working, one piece at a time, plus he’s pretty well maxed out on emotion and adrenaline. He waits for Rust’s response before he reacts.

Rust takes a long breath and in a clearly deliberate move, unclenches his fingers from around the steering wheel. He digs in the centerpiece, lights two cigarettes, and passes one to Marty. Then the gets out of the struck, stretching his back and taking a few steps. After a minute, Marty follows him.

They pace around the truck, looking at the ground or each other, but determinedly not looking up into the burning sky. Rust flexes his hands, and Marty watches that. “You ever seen Yellowstone?”

Marty kicks his legs out, still shaking off the numb feeling from 15 hours of driving. “Never made it up,” he admits. “We close?”

Rust blows out a breath of smoke. “Nah. Relatively speaking, I guess we’re in the right area, but without—“ he knocks on the truck’s still-warm hood. “It’s a ways.”

Rust reaches back into the truck and pushes the seat forward. He digs around in the back, coming up with a thick wool blanket in grey and blue. He shakes it out into the truck bed and climbs up, straddling the side and holding a hand down to Marty. Marty puts a foot on the tire and lets Rust haul him up.

He clambers over the side and sits facing Rust, resolutely keeping his eyes on his partner’s face instead of the sickening swirl of sky above them. “What are we doing?”

Rust slides his hands under Marty’s flannel shirt, long since pulled loose from his belt. “End of days,” he murmurs. “Think we owe it to ourselves, one last time.”

Marty takes a deep breath, feeling Rust’s hands around his ribs as they expand. He hasn’t slept in thirty hours and he’s spent most of them terrified out of his mind, nauseous from the paradigm shift the world has taken, or reeling on the edge of a yawning chasm of grief. “I don’t know if I can,” he admits, because it’s the end of the world after all. But out of all the people he could be left with right now, he got Rust, so he puts his arms around him, drops his head to press his lips against Rust’s collarbone, and breathes against the skin of his neck.

Rust doesn’t rush him, but he leaves his hands under Marty’s shirt, tracing tiny circles on his skin. He bends his head next to Marty’s, pressing whisper-soft kisses along the line of his neck. Marty shivers and Rust presses a thumb into the line of his spine, grounding him like he’s an electric current. Rust reaches the base of Marty’s neck and parts his lips to mouth wetly against Marty’s collarbone. Marty draws a breath in through his nose, and Rust moves slowly back up his neck. Here his kisses are dry. He slides lightly, steadily upwards, brushing his lips delicately over soft skin and faint stubble. He kisses under Marty’s ear, across his cheekbone, and finally Marty swings his face up, takes Rust’s lips with his own, and digs his teeth in. He slides his hands down, down, to the ass he’s been watching off and on for eighteen years now. Marty knows what he likes.

Rust groans in satisfaction and shoves them both down into the truck bed.

Afterwards Rust pulls out another cigarette and they pass it back and forth until it’s gone. Rust rolls up the blanket and pulls a pack out of the backseat. They load it with all the water and beef jerky they have left, the Twinkies and the cigarettes. Rust straps the blanket in, shoulders the pack, and looks at Marty.

“You got a bearing for Old Faithful?” he asks. Rust shrugs at him and points vaguely north.

Under black stars burning in a sickly yellow sky, they start to walk.

**Author's Note:**

> Aside from the general fanfic disclaimer for True Detective (I own none of this, I created none of this), I also owe most of the themes/motifs/imagery in this story to Lovecraft and in particular, obviously, Call of Cthulhu. As in, if you haven’t read it, you won’t believe how much I stole. Imitation, flattery, you know how it goes. 
> 
> If you haven’t read Call of Cthulhu, I highly recommend it. It’s actually absurd how well it ties into True Detective. I could have easily made it a true crossover, it even works geographically in parts. Read it online [here](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx). It’s short, you won’t regret the time investment. 
> 
> My title is from The Decemberists’ song of the same name.


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